Supporting secure collaborations with attribute-based access control

Attribute-based access control (ABAC) has been regarded in recent years as an effective way for providing security guarantees in collaboration environments, due to its alleged flexibility and efficiency for meeting the access control requirements of heterogeneous organizations. Despite the growing interest in ABAC, there still need consensus on a reference model that comprehensively describes all necessary components and functions, in such a way non-trivial security properties can be effectively taken into account. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose an abstract model that includes a precise definition of attributes and relevant core components. In addition, we introduce the notion of security tokens that serve as a layer of association between attributes and access rights. We also validate our results by presenting both a case study and a comparison with existing approaches that have been previously proposed in the literature.